Creepy Tarot on "Buffy"

I'm continuing to work my way through old eps of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and just noticed some tarot cards used to eerie effect in the second season episode called "What's My Line?" (You can watch it for free here if you're so inclined; the most substantial scene featuring tarot starts around 2:45 in the episode.)

The tarot cards in question look like a warped version of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. In this episode, they are laid out by the insane and ailing vampire Drusilla, girlfriend of the bad-arse vampire (and season two's main heavy) Spike.

Dru's grasp on reality and on the ongoing war between Spike and Buffy seems to shift in and out of focus. She's like a Victorian heroine, all pallor and white chiffon--plus fangs, sadistic desires, and many sociopathic tendencies.

In a scene where Spike and a lackey are trying to translate an ancient text that they're hoping will prove the key to restoring Drusilla's health, and to annihilating Buffy, Dru sits at the end of a long wooden table laying out tarot cards. They are oversized (probably to show up better on camera), and are a wonderfully sinister-looking R-W-S knockoff--the Rider-Waite-Smith-Cthulu version, perhaps, with some Lovecraftian imagery added to the regular R-W-S mix.

Many of the cards are pure R-W-S; I noticed the Hierophant, the Emperor, and lots of swords cards in Dru's first layout. But a card that comes up at the end of her spread seems to combine the R-W-S 10 of Swords with an image of a crypt in the background--a dead ringer for the crypt from which Spike's gang steal another sacred artifact a few scenes further on.

Later, Dru also turns over a card with a millipede-ish creature on it, and one with a leopard (the leopard, oddly, seems to be numbered "IIV"--which is no Roman numeral I've heard of, and makes me wonder what kind of photoshopping was going on in 1998 Whedon-land).

I'm curious as to who created these cards, and whether they did so with the permission of U.S. Games, who hold the copyright on the R-W-S deck. And of course, it's disquieting to me to see yet another demonic depiction of tarot in popular culture. 'Cuz of course we all know that all tarot readers are evil, cruel, ill, cursed, and fanged.

But I have to say that they did a good job inventing the perfect deck, visually, for Dru to be using. The dusty colors, the dark-fantasy imagery, and the art-deco-meets-pulp-zine aesthetic are all fully appropriate for this character.